Author: Stevan Harnad

Aging is morphing
into a grotesque caricature
of oneself

Are all traits, distilled,
disgusting?

Or do some percolate
into perfection?

Kriszti, ma szabadultál meg.
Nagypéntek mátol kezdve a te napod is lesz,
ahogy a Mátyás Passzió már mindig is a tiéd volt.
וְשִׁירָתָא תֻּשְׁבְּחָתָא וְנֶחֱמָתָא

Is pledging the non-recurrence of a counterfactual condition casuistry, or just diplomacy?

Going postal has been enfranchised, technologically “empowered.” Now anyone with a grievance, righteous or wrongful, can register his displeasure with a vengeance, on a scale unprecedented, unimagined. Jilted? Blow up her wedding party. Underpaid? Sprinkle Eboli in their staff canteen. Overtaxed? Cyber-raid the IRS’s pantry. Losing Pascal’s Wager? Post Polonium-210 to the infidels (and anyone else along the paper trail). And if all else fails, or you’re in an especial rush, strap on a boom-belt and take out the nearest crowd. ‘At’ll teach ’em.

According to Wired, Marvin Minsky claims in “The Emotion Machine” that “anger, love, and other emotions are types of thought, not feeling.”

In fact it’s exactly the reverse. Thoughts are a kind of feeling (namely, what it feels like to be processing certain information: understanding X, meaning Y, believing Z).

And there’s a world of difference between the two positions. Saying that feeling is just a kind of thinking (i.e., information-processing state) is saying nothing, because the fact that it is felt is precisely what makes whatever kind of “information-processing state” thought is different, and in special need of explanation.

In contrast, saying that thinking is a kind of feeling — though it certainly doesn’t explain feeling! — makes it quite clear that it’s not just feeling pinches and seeing pink that need explanation, but also thinking X.

Hence “thinking” cannot be used as an unexplicated bootstrap for explaining feeling: Just exactly what sort of thing conscious “thinking” is — as opposed to mere unconscious data-crunching — is part of the problem, not the solution!

Zounds, how insouciant people can be, in the ways they keep begging this particular question! Sometimes they don’t have the faintest understanding (only the feeling of understanding).

Which is yet another interesting property of cognition: There’s saying 2+2=4, understanding “2+2=4”, believing that “2+2=4” — and then there’s the further matter of whether 2+2 does indeed equal 4 (or whether snow is white, or F=ma, or april showers indeed bring may flowers…).

See: Harnad, S. (2001) Spielberg’s AI: Another Cuddly No-Brainer.

Verse should converse, inspire, muse,
not just encipher, perplex, bemuse.

Rhyme doesn’t matter nor metre nor trope, really, but,

foremost of all, to hope to be good,
never should verse endeavour to should.

Papal fallibility has come a long way when we have four apologies in a fortnight for having spoken ill of a prophet buried 15 centuries ago, whereas it took 5 decades and 5 popes to apologise for having allowed six million to be incinerated without a murmur of papal protest.

I recycle, not because I think it will make any difference, but because I don’t want to have been one of those because of whose indifference our planet died.

I suppose the same can be said for vegetarianism: It may not save a single animal, but at least it won’t have killed any either.

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SUMMARY: My own approach to both the problem of Consciousness and the problem of Free Will stands apart, I believe, in equating consciousness completely with feeling, in subsuming the free-will problem under the more general problem of the causal role of feeling, and in arguing, unequivocally, that the mind/body problem (which is in reality the feeling/function or feeling/doing problem) — namely, ‘why and how are some functions felt rather than merely “functed”?’ — is insoluble except on pain of telekinetic dualism (hence that Turing-Testing is the only proper (indeed, the only possible) methodology for the cognitive sciences that aspire to explain our cognitive — i.e., doing — capacity).

It makes it rather simple to weigh one’s own position relative to that of others if one “travels lightly” like this. (It prevents having to keep reading — and referring others — to chapter and verse in order to get to the heart of the matter!) I feel rather like a snail, carrying his small earthly wares on his back, for all to see!

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I don’t think free will is so much a belief as a sensation: The sensation of doing something voluntarily, rather than by accident or compulsion. That is no more a matter of belief than the fact that an apple tastes sweet is a matter of belief. Hence I doubt it was invented or evolved (e.g., at the hunter-gatherer to farmer transition in our species’ history)! I think the sensation of volition has been there as long as there has been consciousness (and that’s a long time — at least as long as there has been a nervous system). Explicit beliefs about freedom vs. determinism are more recent, but there too I doubt it came with the transition to farming, or any other behavioural or conceptual transition; it had more to do with our notions of religion and philosophy, whenever those started to take form — probably in ancestral childhood “magical” thinking and the tales told us by our not-much-less magic-minded elders!. I also think questions about the history, phenomenology and concepts of free well need to be separated from questions about the metaphysics of causality.

I think consciousness is a lot older than thinking about consciousness. But there is a fundamental point latent in this: Being conscious means nothing more nor less — I choose my words advisedly — than feeling (sentience). Hence of course they were born at the same time!

http://cogprints.org/2460/

Hence the mind/body problem is actually the “feeling/function problem” (i.e. “What is the nature and causal role, if any, of feelings in the physical, functional world?”)

This should also make it obvious why the problem of feeling and the problem of free will are one and the same (with the free-will version especially limning the crux of the problem, which is one of causality: “What is the causal role of feeling?”).

Most thinkers on this topic, in contrast, are in fact reflecting upon the origins of certain ideas (“beliefs”) we have about consciousness. (This is what philosophers have sometimes called “second order consciousness” or “awareness of being aware,” and they usually end up conflating the two.)

That’s the history of ideas, not the history of consciousness itself (i.e., of feelings, including the feeling of volition or conation.) Ideation — i.e., implicit and explicit cognition — is indeed a bundle of functional capacities that is more recent than sentience, and some of it is indeed unique to the genotype of our verbalising species, and even to the “memotype” of our more recent history and culture.

Whether or not a snail feels certainly doesn’t depend on my definition (any more than whether I feel does!): it depends only on whether or not the snail feels.

What one calls “consciousness” (or what one calls anything) is indeed a matter of definition, and it is a substantive (indeed radical) point I seem to have made (judging from the degree to which it is misunderstood and/or rejected by just about everyone!) in insisting that the only way to make sense of “consciousness” is to equate it with sentience (the capacity to feel).

But I think my point will be found to be quite correct, if one thinks rigorously about it. Loose talk about consciousness and all its fuzzy synonyms (“awareness,” “intentionality,” etc.) is all too easy, as one dances around the phenomenology and its hermeneutics instead of facing up to the phenomenon itself, and the true logical, functional and conceptual challenge it poses — and has always posed.

The ability to reason is not an attribute of consciousness. It is an attribute of cognition. That’s a functional capacity (i.e., it’s something we can do). Computers can do it too: they too can reason. The difference is that they don’t feel. The feeling/function problem — you could also call it the “feeling/doing” problem — again: How/why are some (not all) of our functions felt — rather than just “functed”? (Why do we do some things feelingly, rather than just doingly?)

Exercise: Test your evolutionary hypotheses about the functional role of consciousness on that question: How/why would the things we are able to do consciously not have been identically adaptive if they had been merely functed, rather than felt? (You won’t be able to solve that problem, and that is the real feeling/function or feeling/doing problem; and it includes the free-will problem!)

Stevan Harnad
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